On 31 August 2017, Dr. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History Emerita at New York University, delivered a talk to the History Department entitled, “Double Agents in Early Jamestown: Pocahontas, Thomas Savage, Henry Spelman, and Robert Poole.” Kupperman’s scholarship focuses on the 16th and 17th century Atlantic World, and her presentation focused on the role that children played in the earliest European settlements in the Americas. These children were seen as cross-cultural agents, the fluid identities of youth enabling […]

Read More from Department Hosts Professor Karen Ordahl Kupperman for talk on Children in Early North American Colonies

Thousands of people found themselves living in new and strange circumstances as the Atlantic Ocean was transformed from a barrier to a pathway in the sixteenth century. Jamestown, England’s precarious early seventeenth-century colony, was filled with people whose “true” identity was unclear, including Pocahontas, and three English boys, Thomas Savage, Henry Spelman, and Robert Poole. The boys, like Iberian, French, and English boys before them, were left with Pocahontas’s people to learn their language and culture. Pocahontas, like other American […]

Read More from Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History Emerita at New York University, to speak on “Double Agents in Early Jamestown: Pocahontas, Thomas Savage, Henry Spelman, and Robert Poole,” August 31.